Word: reductionists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...happiness can be defined by the jobs we choose, or what we eat for breakfast, or how many miles we run each week. Freud himself pointed out that the only thing normal is pathology, which makes applying a bell-curve-style prescription for joy more than a little reductionist. Even if all the indicators in our lives point to success, a craving for something indefinable may persist. Aristotle, for instance, thought that happiness was found in living well, and living well meant living with virtue—a distinction that the Grant would elide...
Sloan: Well, all our experience in some way derives from the brain--everything we experience, from meditation to eating cheese. So in some way, it's rooted in the brain. The concern I have is that science operates in a reductionist way, and if you try to understand a spiritual experience or a religious experience from the science perspective, ultimately you are going to reduce it to the coursing of neurochemicals in the brain. And while that may be satisfying to a scientist, it's anathema to a theologian, which illustrates the limits of science. There are some questions...
...satisfaction are mutually exclusive. “Diets are all too often about subtraction,” she said. “Atkins? No carbohydrates. Vegetarianism? No meat. This approach is where we really get in trouble. A traditional Italian would never think that way.”This reductionist approach has reached new extremes. Over-obsession with calorie counts and micronutrient contents—exactly what HUDS is trying to avoid by putting away the placards, is itself a disease, orthorexia. Akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder, orthorexia (meaning literally “correct appetite”) is characterized...
Calling something like love mundane, of course, is true only as far as it goes. Survival of a species is a ruthless and reductionist matter, but if staying alive were truly all it was about, might we not have arrived at ways to do it without joy--as we could have developed language without literature, rhythm without song, movement without dance? Romance may be nothing more than reproductive filigree, a bit of decoration that makes us want to perpetuate the species and ensures that we do it right. But nothing could convince a person in love that there...
...Calling something like love mundane, of course, is true only as far as it goes. Survival of a species is a ruthless and reductionist matter, but if staying alive were truly all it was about, might we not have arrived at ways to do it without joy-as we could have developed language without literature, rhythm without song, movement without dance? Romance may be nothing more than reproductive filigree, a bit of decoration that makes us want to perpetuate the species and ensures that we do it right. But nothing could convince a person in love that there...